| Seducation of Ritual: How Blind Acceptance of Same-Sex Marriage will Ritualize Control, Not Love
“Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations.” This quote starts off David Brooks’ article that was originally printed in the New York Times on November 22, 2003, and has been republished in Andrew Sullivan’s book Same-Sex Marriage Pro and Con: A Reader. The intention of David Brooks’ article was to endorse same-sex marriages, not for legal or religious reasons, but for moral reasons. Under the rubric of “the betterment of society,” politically right gay men are using the institution of marriage against their fellow gay population in the same fashion that marriage has been used against women from the dawn of time – to control their sexuality. Their opponents are the queer activists who see the adoption of marriage by the Gay and Lesbian community as taking away, in the words of Paula Ettelbrick, “an important opportunity to challenge heterocentric sexual and family hierarchies.” Between these two camps is a liberal, heterosexual movement that is willing to adopt same-sex marriage as a civil and, for some, a religious right. This group does not hear the underpinnings of the argument because they have always been connected to the ritual of marriage which does, as we have been taught, control for the “betterment of society”. The goal of this paper is to show how the blind acceptance of same-sex marriage by liberal heterosexuals could in fact set back the fight for female sexuality, while at the same time miss an opportunity to expand the heterosexist understanding of family.
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